my very best (in Chapter VIII., Sec. 2) to clear the exposition of
Socialism from these entanglements, but it is well to recognize that
these are no corruptions of its teaching, but an inevitable
birth-infection that has still to be completely overcome.

Sec. 2.

The comprehensively constructive spirit of modern Socialism is very
much to seek in these childhood phases that came before Marx. These
early projects were for the most part developed by literary men (and
by one philosophic business man, Owen) to whose circle of ideas the
conception of State organization and administration was foreign. They
took peace and order for granted--they left out the school-master, the
judge and the policeman, as the amateur architect of the anecdote left
out the staircase. They set out to contrive a better industrial
organization, or a better social atmosphere within the present scheme
of things. They wished to reform what they understood, and what was
outside their circle of ideas they took for granted, as they took the
sky and sea. Not only was their literature Utopian literature, about
little islands of things begun over again from the beginning, but
their activities tended in the direction of Utopian experiments
equally limited and isolated. Here again a just critic will differ
from many contemporary Socialists in their depreciation of this sort
of work. Owen's experiments in socialized production were of enormous
educational and scientific value. They were, to use a mining expert's
term, "hand specimens" of human welfare of the utmost value to
promoters. They made factory legislation possible; they initiated the
now immense co-operative movement; they stirred commonplace
imaginations as only achievement can stir them; they set going a
process of amelioration in industrial conditions that will never, I
believe, cease again until the Socialist state is attained.

But apart from Owen and the general advertisement given to Socialist
ideas, it must be admitted that a great majority of Socialist
communities have, by every material standard, failed rather than
succeeded. Some went visibly insolvent and to pieces, others were
changed by prosperity. Some were wrecked by the sudden lapse of the
treasurer into an extreme individualism. Essentially Socialism is a
project for the species, but these communities made it a system of
relationships within a little group; to the world without they had
necessarily to turn a competitive face, to